B.5. Debian Partitioning Programs

Several varieties of partitioning programs have been adapted by Debian
developers to work on various types of hard disks and computer
architectures. Following is a list of the program(s) applicable for
your architecture.

partman

Recommended partitioning tool in Debian. This Swiss army knife can
also resize partitions, create filesystems
and assign them to the mountpoints.

One of these programs will be run by default when you select
Partition a Hard Disk. If the one which is run
by default isn't the one you want, quit the partitioner, go to the shell
(tty2) by pressing Alt
and F2 keys together, and manually type in the
name of the program you want to use (and arguments, if any). Then
skip the Partition a Hard Disk step in
debian-installer and continue to the next step.

If you will be working with more than 20 partitions on your ide disk,
you will need to create devices for partitions 21 and beyond. The next
step of initializing the partition will fail unless a proper device is
present. As an example, here are commands you can use in
tty2 or under Execute A Shell to add a device
so the 21st partition can be initialized:

# cd /dev
# mknod hda21 b 3 21
# chgrp disk hda21
# chmod 660 hda21

Booting into the new system will fail unless proper devices are present
on the target system. After installing the kernel and modules, execute:

B.5.1. Partitioning for PA-RISC

PALO, the HPPA boot loader, requires a partition of type “F0” somewhere
in the first 2GB. This is where the boot loader and an optional kernel
and RAMdisk will be stored, so make it big enough for that — at least
4Mb (I like 8–16MB). An additional requirement of the firmware is that
the Linux kernel must reside within the first 2GB of the disk. This
is typically achieved by making the root ext2 partition fit entirely
within the first 2GB of the disk. Alternatively you can create a small
ext2 partition near the start of the disk and mount that on
/boot, since that is the directory where the Linux
kernel(s) will be stored. /boot needs to be big enough
to hold whatever kernels you might wish load; 8–16MB is generally
sufficient.